Nice one you found slim.o.. Nice Zappa poem reworked by Rich Wagner.(RW not familiar) The poems far-out though and Fritz' is right on the mark to.Happy Holidaze to one and all Zappa Freaks like us,everywhere,may Frank play you all an extended guitarsolo in your dreams tonight and y'all all wake to new SG's & a New Year full of Frank Zappa releases from the ZFT!...Whew! Salud & Peace,KK

there are approximately 2 billion children [persons under 18] in the world, however, since santa doesn't visit children of muslim, hindu, shinto, jewish, taoist, krishna or buddhist religions [as eloquently noted by my_name_is_fritz], this reduces the workload for christmas night to approx. 15% of the total, or 378 million [according to the population reference bureau].

at an average [census] rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

santa has approx. 31 hours of christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west [which seems logical]; this works out to 967.7 visits per second ...for each christian household with a good child, santa has approx. 1/1000th of a second to:

park the sleigh

hop out

slide down the chimney

fill the stockings

distribute the remaining presents under the tree

eat whatever snacks have been left for him

get his fat ass back up the chimney

jump into the sleigh, and

get on to the next house

.

assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth [which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations], we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks.

this means santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second -- 3,000 times the speed of sound ... for purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run [at best] 15 miles per hour max..

the payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element; assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized lego set [2 pounds], the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting santa himself.

on land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds; even granting that the 'flying' reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them -- santa would need 360,000 reindeer to move the sleigh.

this increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the queen elizabeth [the ship, not the monarch].

554,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second crates enormous air resistance -- this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere; the lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each … in short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake.

the entire team of 360,000 reindeer would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time santa reached the 5th house on his trip.

not that it matters, however, since santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 miles per second in 0.001 seconds, would be subjected to forces of 17,500 g's.

a 250 pound santa [which seems ludicrously slim] would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob ofpink goo

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